The United States intelligence community’s research arm is set to launch a program that will thoroughly broaden the capabilities of biometric facial recognition software in order to establish an individual’s identity.

The Janus program of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects
Agency (IARPA) will begin in April 2014 in an effort to
"radically expand the range of conditions under which
automated face recognition can establish identity," according
to documents released by the agency over the weekend.

Janus "seeks to improve face recognition performance using
representations developed from real-world video and images
instead of from calibrated and constrained collections. During
daily activities, people laugh, smile, frown, yawn and morph
their faces into a broad variety of expressions. For each face,
these expressions are formed from unique skeletal and musculature
features that are similar through one's lifetime. Janus
representations will exploit the full morphological dynamics of
the face to enable better matching and faster retrieval."

Current facial recognition relies mostly on full-frontal, aligned
facial views. But, in the words of Military & Aerospace
Electronics, Janus will fuse “the rich spatial, temporal, and
contextual information available from the multiple views captured
by security cameras, cell phone cameras, news video, and other
sources referred to as ‘media in the wild.’”

In addition, Janus will take into account aging and incomplete or
ambiguous data for its recognition assessment goals.

IARPA was created in 2006 and is a division of the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence. The intelligence agency is
modeled after DARPA, the Pentagon’s notorious research arm that
fosters technology for future military utilization.

In-Q-Tel, a not-for-profit venture capital firm run by the
Central Intelligence Agency, invests in companies that develop
facial recognition software.

In an age of ubiquitous surveillance video amid a severe lag of
legal protections for privacy, civil liberties advocates are
expressing concern.

IARPA’s effort to significantly boost facial recognition
capabilities "represents a quantum leap in the amount of
surveillance taking place in public places,” said Jay
Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil
Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, as
quoted by USA Today.

Stanley noted that law enforcement and the like could easily run
random facial recognition programs over surveillance video to
assess the identities of crowds in public places without
oversight.

IARPA gave industry representatives a solicitation briefing on
the program in June, according to media reports.

Late last month, the Federal Bureau of Investigation published a request for information in developing
“a roadmap for the FBI's future video analytics
architecture” as the agency prepares to make its high-tech
surveillance abilities all the more powerful.

In September, the Department of Homeland Security tested its Biometric Optical Surveillance System
(BOSS) at a junior hockey game in Washington state. When it’s
fully operational, BOSS could be used to identify a person of
interest among a massive crowd in just seconds.

Over the summer, the state of Ohio admitted it had access to a facial recognition
database that included all state-wide driver’s license photos and
mug shots without the public’s knowledge.